Article

The Games are Back

Published on Thu, 2012-05-17 14:34

By:

Kevin Daigle

Kevin Daigle gives an insider's look into 2012 Regional coverage.

My, how things have changed. I knew the day would come when the winter of discontent would be a distant memory – like a fart wafting on the breeze of the warm spring air here in Santa Cruz. Gone is the sting of the cold – actually gone is New England all together – and the emptiness left by the absence of the CrossFit Games.

We're back baby, with guns blazing! The Open launched us like a Top Fuel dragster, and now we're smack in the middle of Regionals. There are more articles than I can read and more media than any single person can consume in each region. It's massive. The coverage is so in depth, you can follow the CrossFit Games more closely than any rabid fans of baseball can follow the boys of summer.

In sharp contrast to the depression of post-Games winter, we're now in the white-hot, roiling tempest of the CrossFit Games Regionals. Two weeks ago, I was in the office at 4 a.m. following Asia, Africa, Mid Atlantic, and the South West – all trying to find their fittest to send to Carson, Calif. Don't tell anyone, but I'd be doing that shit even if they weren't paying me. With the Twitter feed from each region, the individual Regional Facebook pages, the CrossFit Games Facebook and Twitter, and all the tweets and status updates from the community, it's almost as if you're standing right there.

There are about 150 separate videos published by CrossFit every weekend. There is so much content being published, Joey “Jaws” Chestnut couldn't digest it all – in each region – never mind across all of them. That’s not even considering the articles and pictures. The excitement is visible. There’s not a shirt in the house without nipple-holes worn through it.

There's never been more of a sport. Tell the hordes of people huddled around laptops, phones and tablets this isn't a sport. Fuck that bullshit. In what other sport is virtually every single fan also a participant? Sure, lots of football fans played back in the day (I did,) but probably not in years. In CrossFit, the spectators still play. In fact, they played this morning. They might still be at the box, huddled around a smart phone screaming, “GO SPEAL, GO!!!”

Sport, in part, is defined by its inherent unpredictability. The weekend of the South West Regional was a perfect example of that. Yet another competition people thought was too heavy, too “big-guy-biased” for poor little Chris Spealler to win. There was just one problem, Chris Spealler is not a known giver of fucks about what people “think.” He came from behind, in an event that arguably was not ideal for a man his size, and inspired us all to dream that we can do more. Logic dictates that Speal shouldn’t be going to the Games again, but he is. Oh yes, this is a sport … and it’s as pulse pounding as any sport has ever been.

This is the most interactive sports season of all time. It's such a sensory cornucopia of media, I have a 6-foot CrossFit Games boner with a grass-fed cheeseburger on the end of it. If you were as depressed as I was this winter, this is the opposite of that. It's functional fitness euphoria.

This is going to be sicker than Stephen Hawking with influenza. Try and calm your nerves enough so you can type the URLs and click the mouse button. Log on to the CrossFit Games site, follow the NorCal Twitter feed, and check the updates on the Australia Region’s Facebook page. And don’t forget to check out North Central coverage. Get all the up-to-the-minute coverage on this Twitter list, that combines all the Regional Twitter accounts, as well as @CrossFitGames.